Bill Gates warns on AI jobs loss, Bernie Sanders backs him
AI was named in 112,713 announced US job cuts through July, about 24 percent of the total and the leading stated reason for five straight months, yet overall announced cuts are down 41 percent year on year.
Writing on X late Sunday night, the Vermont senator said Gates was right that AI “poses a grave threat to jobs and the future of humanity” and that dealing with the risks should be, in Gates’s phrase, the world’s top priority. US Senator Bernie Sanders has thrown his weight behind Bill Gates once more, endorsing the Microsoft co-founder’s warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious danger to jobs and to human life. He closed with a line in capitals: “WE MUST ACT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Not everyone is convinced. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang pushed back last week, saying he loves Gates but does not see what Gates sees, and predicting AI will create work at unprecedented scale. The numbers so far sit awkwardly between them.
That letter cited reports of models being used to help design new viruses and of AI systems breaching other companies’ servers, which Sanders read as evidence that the industry’s own risk thresholds had already been crossed.
Earlier this month he went further, writing to the chief executives of Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic and asking them to pause frontier development outright.